Recent Comments

argo: a really amazing bug!!!! okay, lets say there are only 1000 resources in your city...city A....500 of the 1000 are protected by the warehouse....all goods read more

JC Barnett: I have come to the point where Ikariam has become tedious, with soft-caps making any further growth pretty much impossible and unless you are aggressive read more

Rahul Das: Ikariam seems to be based a lot on OGame, also by GameForge. A lot of features are derivatives of features in Ogame. But Ikariam is read more

a_indikaze: From what I can tell, Ikariam is a carbon-copy of Travian (at least, it has most of the features of Travian, including all the "interesting" read more

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[Mathew Kumar is continuing his excellent work on our sister online worlds site WorldsInMotion.biz, and in the course of compiling the Worlds In Motion Atlas has had reason to check out Ikariam, which is a browser-based Civilization-ish type thing and it... well, interesting, for lack of a better term.]

Here's an overview of Ikariam. Online worlds are usually avatar based, and if they're games, they're normally RPGs. Developer GameForge bucks the trend with a browser based real-time strategy title that is most usually compared to Sid Meier's Civilization series.

Name:Ikariam

Company: GameForge

Established: February 2008

How it Works:Ikariam is browser based and runs in HTML and Javascript. Navigation and gameplay are accomplished via mouse and keyboard input.

Overview: In Ikariam, users create a town on a randomly assigned island. On their island are up to 15 other players, plus a sawmill and a unique resource. The aim of the game is for the player to create the largest and most prosperous city by accumulating resources through production, trade or warfare, and developing new technologies and buildings as a result.

Payment Method:Ikariam is free to play, and earns revenue via "Ikariam Plus" a system where players can purchase "ambrosia" which can be spent to receive in-game bonuses.

Key Features:
- A massively multiplayer real-time strategy title
- "Always on" - players' cities are costantly working, even when they're not logged in
- Players can not only fight with each other, but perform diplomacy, forming alliances and trade agreements

Ikariam: In-Depth Tour

When most gamers think “real-time strategy” they tend to think of games like Command and Conquer and Age of Empires. However, Ikariam is a lot more leisurely paced, but can also be (perhaps surprisingly!) more stressful!

You see, Ikariam is a “real time” title in that after you’ve founded your city (in my case, Arx Prosperitas, which I hope means “Prosperous Fortress”, but I’m not particularly good at Latin) you simply set your townsfolk to some tasks -- usually researching discoveries, working at the island’s saw mill for materials, and constructing new buildings.

And then you wait in real time.

This is a genuinely surprising thing when you first begin to play Ikariam! The first time I began building something -- an academy, to make research possible -- being told I had to wait 15 minutes for it to be completed was a shock!

However, it’s fairly quick to get into the groove with the game, but what it does mean is that you’ll (certainly in the beginning stages) be leaving the browser window running for a long time while you perform other, non-game related tasks (catching up on e-mail, work, etc.) while you wait to be able to build your next structure, as you can’t stack building orders.

Once you’ve built your town up to at least a basic level -- with an academy, barracks, trading post and port -- you can start to take part in the larger game. A little earlier I mentioned “your island’s” saw mill, and in fact you share your island with up to 16 other players/towns, and all use the same resources. Each island has one saw mill and one luxury to mine (either sulphur, marble, grapes or crystal) and though there is no limit to the amount that can be mined, players are advised to work together and contribute building materials to the improvement of each resource to allow them to mine as much as possible -- especially as players can attack other players on the same island if they feel they’re not pulling their weight.

But the majority of the play is formed through trading and battling with the inhabitants of other islands. A great deal of the game is based on trading across the free market using cargo ships, but if you’re of a more warlike persuasion you can also choose to pillage other cities with your units too.

All of this takes time, of course! It can take several hours for cargo ships to reach their destination (it isn’t instant!) and even time for them to load goods, so Ikariam is a game that requires a lot of patience -- and trust, because the situation on your island, or with your trading partners, can easily change in a few hours while you’re away.

Due to the game’s heavy requirements on patience, it actually takes a very long time to get into the position where you are going to feel like you’re able to compete/interact with other players across the world (rather than just with the inhabitants on your own island) but once you are ready there is plenty of potential for taking part in the game’s social aspects, such as alliances, trade agreements and more.

Yet the question remains – is this a game that benefits from being massively multiplayer? Is the resulting community interesting from a social worlds stand point? I’ll take a look in the upcoming conclusion.

Ikariam: Conclusion

Ikariam is an odd one. Not just because of the way it’s chosen to be a Civilization-styled title in a MMO market dominated by RPGs, but in the way it has chosen to be that. There are a lot of odd design decisions.

The most obvious first -- the complete inability to stack building projects. Want to build a trading post upgrade, then a hideout, and then a embassy? Well, you’d better be prepared to log back in each time you want the next object built, because your townsfolk can’t be given a list of things to do.

I can see why they did it -- without this restriction, the beginning stage of the game would consist of setting up your townsfolk a huge list of things to build, and then coming back in a few days once they’d done it all. But even then -- why is it fun, or at all interesting, to have to build all of these essential buildings anyway? There are few (if any!) you can get away without building, so in your first town at least it’s a slog to get to the point where you can play the game.

This is made slightly worse by the complete lack of any usable tutorial -- in the end I simply resorted to using the beginner's guide on Wikariam, which details, by and large, roughly the only way to progress in the early stages of the game. The initial Ikariam experience is complex enough that I’m sure it puts most casual players off.

Once you get over that hurdle though there’s a strange sort of addictiveness to the basic play -- trading and mining materials to build and improve your city (and, indeed, your empire, once you’ve reached the point where you can colonize other islands.)

But notably, there isn’t very much drive to interact with other players inherent with the game. It does have an economic model based around trading and pillaging which is at least slightly interesting, and there is both power and meaning from taking part in trade agreements and alliances, but it’s very unlikely that you will “socialize” with them at all. Certainly in the early stages, when it comes to trading, you may as well be trading with NPCs.

Now, a game doesn’t have to have socialization as an important part of its gameplay to be a virtual world (and in its way, Ikariam very definitely is a virtual world) but it’s rather interesting how quiet a world it is despite all of the hustle and bustle of trading.

Not to say that Ikariam isn't a good game -- one that is very addictive even if you’re only able to spare a few minutes each day to play. I’m not sure if GameForge have a particularly excellent handle on why it is good though, nor how to improve it. As the game continues to have basic interface flaws, they recently began offering an Ikariam Plus premium account, a new interface upgrade that you can pay for on a weekly basis.

It’s only of particular use to high level players, unfortunately, and also doesn’t fix any of the most obvious problems (like not being able to list orders in advance). In addition, they’ve created Ikariam Plus bonuses, which allow players to pay some real cash to receive some instant bonuses to their trading values of specific luxuries for a week or so.

This is a genuinely weird decision as it unbalances the game somewhat -- unlike many developers who have sworn that their paid-for content isn’t going to allow some players an unfair advantage, and this very definitely does, and seems like something less useful to players in general than the aforementioned interface changes.

But Ikariam soldiers on. Though its social aspects are underdeveloped the game’s economics make it a virtual world of interest, and it’s a very playable game. And in particular, by choosing to do things differently, it opens up the virtual world market to gamers who wouldn’t normally be interested in the genre, and for that reason has a place here.

4 Comments

From what I can tell, Ikariam is a carbon-copy of Travian (at least, it has most of the features of Travian, including all the "interesting" ones earmarked in this article, such as a better interface and resource advantages for paying customers) with one crucial difference: With Travian, players play for keeps. It is possible to wipe someone off the board completely by destroying all their buildings. Not so in Ikariam; however it is harder to hide resources.

Also Travian is more clearly homage to Settlers of Catan. And Ikariam streamlines a lot of concepts introduced in Travian, and supports colony expansions faster.

Ikariam seems to be based a lot on OGame, also by GameForge. A lot of features are derivatives of features in Ogame.
But Ikariam is an unfinished product (currently at version 0.2.8) and a lot remains to be done. It may very well add new features in the future. We will have to see.

I have come to the point where Ikariam has become tedious, with soft-caps making any further growth pretty much impossible and unless you are aggressive there simply isn't a game to play anymore to speak of.

What is most interesting, and which has not been touched upon in this article, is the fact here are many game rules outside of the actual game design, that are lorded over by mods and written about extensively in the forums. There are many things the game allows you to do that are considered "illegal" and for which you can be punished by draconian ban rules. It's an interesting (if onerous) aspect of the game that requires some investigation, I think. Can game rules be layered on top of the game design and if so how do you enforce them? Does the game design have to encompass all the game rules in itself? How do you make sure these extra rules are communicated to the players?
All these are question GameForge themselves also need to ask.

okay, lets say there are only 1000 resources in your city...city A....500 of the 1000 are protected by the warehouse....all goods you have are in the warehouse. if you are first level warehouse and you only have a max of 500 per each resource before you cant take any more, well, you can't put 500 in the traders, and still have more besides that....

so, you have all your resources in the traders, and half of all your resources are protected by the warehouse protection....

when someone invades, they walk away with what isnt protected....but, after they load and leave, if you check your traders, all your resources will still be there. so basically, the game creates new resources to give to the would be pillager...and leaves you with what you had.

this can be used in two main ways.....

1) because having all your resources protected by the traders, you don't have to protect your towns....you could, for a time, have all your mines and mills at 0 workers, you could make crazy $ really quickly, and then you could just buy a ton of trade ships....and you don't loose any resources in doing so...except wine....because you need to constantly use wine....so it is good to have PLENTY of wine before doing this....you can keep the wine in the traders and just leave 50 or 100 out for each city at a time...

so, it's a quick way to put all your energy into making gold with no risk....a good thing to do here would be to fire alot of your army, and just let your cities do there work...i bet you could get 10 trade ships within a few hours if you did this....

another thing would be, if your resources are safe in your cities if they are in the traders, put your resources in the traders in all but one city...then, your main city, the one you want to build up levels with, you put all your troops and armies and ships....then, from there, you pillage everyone around you, building up resources...once you are satisfied with your level of town house, or governors residence, or of your palace or whatever, you simply put your remaining resources in the traders, and then send your army to the next city to do their work there...

by doing this, you could probably build 3 or 4 levels of the palace up in one sitting....get a bunch of cargo ships while youre doing it, and then go and setlle places, sending your army in, and settling them one by one....building up GR right away...to get out of coruption. or at least to 25% or less...then, move onto the next city.

so that is one strategy you could employ with this secret.

and another one~!

2) you can find someone who is willing to be a co-conspirator. what you do is this: you put all your resources into traders, and same with them. then, when the time is right, at the same time, you both send all of each others fleets into the other to pillage....now, what happens? you both pillage, and gain the resources that the game creates from the bug. so if you both have 10 000 reources, and 1000 are protected, you each walk away with 9000 new resources that get created out of thin air!

this one is a little more dngerous in that, you could probably get caught if you were doing it too much....or if you did it a bunch and just...OSHHHHEWWW you went from 100 place to 5 place in overall rankings in a few hours, they would know something was up...

but the first way, there is basically no way they can catch you as long as you arent putting like 10 000 resources in the traders. and if you have a main city you are working on at one time with all the armies there pillaging, well, what you can do is this: spend all the money on new levels of palaces or whatever, and then move onto the next place...if you have a conspicuous number of resources, then ship them to the next city...or even better, because you found a loophole that allows you to concentrte your might, allowing you to gain $$$ way faster by completely concentrating on one ity at a time, you can simply put them in the traders, in smaller ammount (no more than 5000 at this point in the game), and sell for 5$ each...it isnt alot, but you will sell them VERY quick, and the $$$ you make can buy you a ton of cargo ships....so you can get even more when you are pillaging!!!!!